Mac Bits and Bytes

I don’t have much to say about the big story of the last few days. You know the one, about that guy at Apple stepping down. Steve somebody… I see that David mentioned it briefly in his latest blog at InfoSecurity Magazine.

In fact, in Comex: Scrumper turned Gamekeeper he mostly talks about Comex’s internship at Apple. David sounds uncharacteristically optimistic about the good that might come out of it. I think it’s probably just a mechanism for killing off JailBreakMe. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is an argument that I’m not prepared to take up before breakfast.

David was also quoted at some length in an article by Drew Amorosi for the magazine, but I haven’t seen an online copy yet.

John Gruber made a nice point over at Daring Fireball a few days ago. He’s been pointing out for a considerable time that Apple’s share in the smartphone market is rather more impressive than Android’s presence. Except as far as malware is concerned: a couple of reports have come out observing that in that area at least, Android is now the major contender. This gives Gruber the opportunity to ask: ”

Remember the old argument about Apple platforms not getting malware only because they weren’t popular enough to attract attention?

Low blow, sophistry, but nicely put. What he isn’t saying is that OS X is the smaller player in its market, where both Microsoft and Apple are reasonably good at maintaining a reasonably secure operating system. (Kids, we’re talking Windows 7 here, not Windows 95 or System 7.) I don’t happen to think that market share is the only difference, but it’s viable to argue that it’s a significant factor.

iOS versus Android is a whole different playing field: the Apple end is tightly locked down, whereas the Android end is – shall we say politely – a little looser. It looks to me as if Apple’s iron rule is giving them a considerable edge here, and market share is, in this case, much less important than ease of exploitation.